Nate Jones column: Don't tolerate broken classification system

11:58 PM,
Mar. 13, 2014

Written by

Nate Jones
National Security Archive

Last month, Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper got a lot of people's attention when he conceded the American people should have been told that the National Security Agency was tracking their calls. "Had we been transparent about this from the outset, ? we wouldn't have had the problem we had." This striking remark exposes another dirty little secret: there are trillions of other improperly classified records that could harmlessly be revealed.

In fact, it's so easy to classify new secrets that government classifiers joke that they can find the authority to classify a ham ...